When comparing DEC Terminal Modern vs MonoLisa, the Slant community recommends MonoLisa for most people. In the question“What are the best programming fonts?” MonoLisa is ranked 54th while DEC Terminal Modern is ranked 78th. The most important reason people chose MonoLisa is:
The website offers customizable downloads for editors that don't support OpenType features natively.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Great looking retro font.
I use 18-point DEC Terminal Modern for interacting with OpenVMS systems, with anti-aliasing and subpixel anti-aliasing. With a dark background and a soft white, amber, or green foreground, it's very reminiscent of the physical terminals, though I don't actually have one for comparison.
Unless you want an ultra-retro "rasterized" appearance, I would recommend it by far over either "Glass TTY VT220" or "VT220-mod".
A very slight "con" is that it doesn't work well with at least some of iTerm2's built-in Powerline glyphs. Spaces appear as filled blocks, for example.
Pro Interesting look
The look of DEC Terminal Modern is somewhat retro-inspired.
Pro Customizable OpenType features downloads
The website offers customizable downloads for editors that don't support OpenType features natively.
Pro Script variant
It comes with script variant for italics.
Pro Ligatures
The typeface supports over 120 optionally enabled ligatures for common coding tasks.
Pro Italics
The typeface comes with an italic version.
Pro Space
Space used by the characters has been carefully balanced to keep them light to read.
Pro Reading flow
The characters have been designed to flow into each other so that the font feels easy to read.
Pro Distinction
Specific care has been put to make programming characters such as 1, i, and l or O or 0 easy to tell apart.
Pro Wider than usual
As it's wider, this means there's more space for designing characters like "m".
Cons
Con Not free
This font requires a purchase in order to be used. The cheapest version ('Basic') is 60 dollars. There is a free trial, though.
Con Wider than usual
As it's wider, this means a short adjustment period may be required. If you have a limited amount of horizontal space, the wider glyphs may be problematic as well.